Be a Hero, Not Part of the Problem

I feel lucky that I was raised by (straight) parents who were constantly pointing out which celebrities were gay — even when those celebrities hadn’t yet come out themselves. Hello, “Thorn Birds”-era Richard Chamberlain. My mother would not shut up about you.

Not all gay people in the media feel as radical as I do about why it’s important for gay celebrities to come out of the closet. But having been a teenager in the 1980s, I remember when there were no — as in zero — out role models for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender kids to emulate. Instead, we survived on rumors of Sapphic superstar love triangles and A-list leading men who joined cults that helped keep their gay secrets. Gossip has its own power, not to mention pleasure, but let’s face it: The world is a better place when people aren’t lying.

When I was a teenager, there were zero out role models; we survived on rumors. But the world is a better place when people aren’t lying.

So much has changed since that time, and there is now a platter of options for celebrities who want to come out. There’s the People magazine route (splashy, safe, widely-circulated); there’s the recent Matt Bomer path, when he casually, yet seismically, thanked his longtime male partner during a speech (see also: Jodie Foster); and there’s a new road that I really like, which is the Zachary Quinto/Jim Parsons method, in which an actor simply identifies himself as gay as part of a bigger story in a highbrow news outlet. (Quinto chose New York magazine; Parsons picked The New York Times—it’s responsibly handled, kind of cool, and simultaneously self-promotional.) A recent Entertainment Weekly cover story by Mark Harris analyzed the evolution under the headline “The New Art of Coming Out.”

And it does strike me as an art. To which Anderson Cooper added a new form on Monday, coming out to The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan in an e-mail, no less. Cooper has struck me in recent years as an example of a closeted famous person who didn’t mean for his secret to become such a big deal, and found himself stuck. But I think he’ll find that it’s easy to go from being a part of the toxic problem of homophobic self-hatred to a hero. And who wouldn’t want that?